I saw a middle aged woman pushing a loaded shopping cart reach down into a gas station garbage bin to retrieve a pop can.
Got me thinking how we rely on the poor to recycle the pop cans that would other wise miss the collection system.
Would be nice if she could fetch more than a nickel for a pop can or a dime for a beer can.
I remember back in the early sixties collecting 5 pop bottles so I could buy a bottle of pop at the corner mom and pop convenience store. (10 cents for a pop included a hidden deposit fee of 2 cents)
That woman needs 20 cans today.
Back in the day no one gave much thought to recycling which makes the declining value of the deposit in todays recycling conscious society somewhat puzzling.
Just who is responsible for deciding what the bottle/can deposit price is ?
I don’t remember the deposit fee as being hidden. If you brought back empties, you paid the price of the pop without the deposit. Without empties to return, you paid for the deposit on the bottle above the price of the soda, say an extra 48¢ for 2¢ times 24 bottles. But it was always stated that the price was the cost of the soda plus deposit. Also, most stores no longer charge deposits. You’re not going to get a discount on your soda for bringing the empty cans back. You have to pay a deposit in some states, but that’s set by the particular state.
It’s set by the state. That’s why Michigan has a 10 cent deposit instead of the more usual 5 cent rate. Voters get irate when you jack up the price of their groceries, plus politicians get concerned about freeloaders from abutting states cashing in on generous returns while paying into the coffers of their cheap home states.
I recycle all my cans and bottles and never see a nickel because it’s too much of a pain to take a sticky garbage bag of empties to the machines at the grocery store. I would be interested in the true rates of Michigan recycling since I suspect a fair amount of their stats come from bordering states cashing in.
The homeless woman does not need as much cash as you do, but, every little bit helps.The bordering states do play a part. When I was a teen in Oregon, I would often get pop cans & bottles out of my relatives trash in Washington & Idaho. I then turned them in for the Oregon bottle refund. I also got them out of the public trash cans in all three of these states. It helped me buy gas for my rigs. When I drive down to Oregon, I still take all of my empties with me, room permitting. It is not a lot of $$, but every little bit helps.
We do not have a bottle deposit here in Colorado. I still see folks collect the aluminium cans out of the trash. Scrap value of one pop can is much less then one cent. As one pensioner told me, “It keeps me out of bars, gives me exercise, and supports my driving habit”. There are many folks who collect and recycle the pop cans for the “green of it” and some who do it for the above stated reasons.
Almost anyone can see the benefits of recycling the cans & bottles. It does get done to some degree without the deposit & refund system, but it does help if there is a refund & deposit of at least $0.05 for the cans & bottles. I can see the difference in the roadside ditches it the various states. While I am by no stretch of the imagination an “Environmentalist” I do support reasonable “bottle bills” anywhere I live.
The OP states “That woman needs 20 cans today”. I am going to ASSuME that The Flying Dutchman meant that she needs 20 cent cans today. I would like to point out that if those cans were worth 20 cents, they would not be in the trash cans for her to gather. Folks would make the effort themselves to get the larger refund. She would most likely make less $$ if we changed the deposit by a factor of four.
There is a balancing point somewhere between $0.00 and $0.25 (as a guess) where the cans & bottles get thrown out and where they all get recycled. Just where that is I do not know. I do not want to debate the balance point. I do believe that a “bottle bill” is, for the most part, a good idea.
As to “Just who is responsible for deciding what the bottle/can deposit price is ?” the answer to that is, the voting public. IIRC, it takes a vote by the public to change the rate of the refund in Oregon. The “bottle bill” was a big issue when I was in HS. I do remember the debates about it at the time. I did vote for it. I noticed a marked improvement in the cleanliness of our roadsides just after it passed.
I don’t see the need. The purpose of the deposit is to encourage recycling. And it’s working - people redeem bottles and cans rather than throw them out. So the nickel deposit is apparently enough to accomplish the goal.
Now if we want to establish a new goal of providing income more to poor people, I think there’s a need for a general debate on the issue. I strongly doubt that raising the bottle and can deposit is the best means to accomplish that goal. I’m sure we could come up with ten better ideas in less than a day.
Can anyone explain to me why it’s only certain sodas/pops/carbonated beverages and alcohols that have a deposit, as opposed to all bottled drinks? I personally think it’s an awesome idea (as a Michigander I always make sure to bring back my bottles for deposit) and am just curious as to why it never extended to cover all bottled beverages. I’d imagine there’d be a lot less bottles in landfills if people had the same incentive to bring them back.
I’ll support this when there’s system on my recycle bin to count the cans I put in and credit my credit card appropriately. I thought we had finally gotten away from having to haul loads of empties back to the store with the demise of glass bottles.
I’m no economist, but it seems like one of those things that would be untenable in real life. You could increase it for inflation, but otherwise it’s an artificial floor.
Isn’t it by material and such? Glass okay (have to sort clear-green-brown in some places). Cans made from aluminum but not “tin.” I can’t remember if plastic does this, but many recycling places won’t take numbers 3-7, only PET/PETE and HDPE.
Also - does this encourage recycling? Maybe further down the line (homeless checking your dumpster for cans), but most consumers either don’t recycle, or have a special dumpster/can for recyclables. Most don’t haul bags to behind the supermarket.
Politics usually. Industries would prefer not to have to deal with recycling and they also feel that deposits hurt sales. So if they have a strong lobbying arm, they can put pressure on legislators to exempt them for deposit laws. Juice bottlers, for example, will argue that exempting juice from deposit laws encourages kids to drink healthy juice instead of unhealthy soda.
Again, what types of bottles are covered is mandated by state legislation. I know that Connecticut recently added water bottles to its deposit system where they were previously exempt. I assume massive amounts of money is spent by bottlers to lobby state government against deposit programs.
But, if the Wikipedia page is to be believed, a deposit scheme does actually work, raising average recycling rates from 33% to 70%. The question is whether that increase in recycling is worth the sheer dollars spent by consumers, retailers (providing the machines), and bottlers.
No, it’s not by materials. We’ll throw out aluminum cans that were once filled with juice- no deposit. Carbonated though? You bet they’ll be saved. Haven’t seen a carbonated beverage here yet that doesn’t have a deposit on it (any Michganders find one, let me know!)
Also, this does encourage the returning of the pop cans. Up here MOST people DO haul cans back to the stores. We have bins that scan the barcodes as you put each can in and when you’re done a slip is printed out with the amount to be given to you at the register. Is it a pain in the ass? Yeah. Do I still do it? Yeah. Remember, deposit ≠ recycling. We don’t haul these to just any old recycling center and get paid by the pound. We’re essentially getting our ten cents extra that we were charged back per can/bottle. If you decide to just toss them out, it’s like adding on an additional $1.20 to every twelve pack you buy.
If you raise the deposit sufficiently, people will stop being so cavalier about throwing them away. You end up taking money *away *from the homeless who pick up the bottles from people who can’t be bothered for a nickel.
(Much like raising the minimum wage, but I won’t get into that here.)
Either way, I’m recycling my empties. I’d rather just be able to throw them into the single-point recycling bin, but instead I have to worry about whether or not a particular store will actually take them back, deal with the stupid machines, and otherwise waste my time dealing with the stupid bottle bill. Yes, I could just throw them into the recycling anyway but then I’d be throwing away as much as $100 a year. I would think that making recycling easier overall would get better results than continuing to deal with a deposit system.